


how the clouds swung low over kings and thieves

by York



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Dreaming, Freeform, Love Confessions, M/M, Pre-Epilogue, Ronan Lynch Loves Adam Parrish, forever wanted to use that tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-21
Updated: 2017-05-21
Packaged: 2018-11-03 03:12:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10958454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/York/pseuds/York
Summary: Waking up next to the boy he loves is still something he is getting used to. He wants so badly to get used to it.Ronan watches Adam wake, and can't shake off dreams that speak words yet unspoken.





	how the clouds swung low over kings and thieves

**Author's Note:**

> wanted to write in Ronan's POV for so long and of course what follows is introspection about loving Adam Parrish with all his heart. typical.
> 
> hope you enjoy. title from Belly of the Deepest Love by Tow'rs.

Tonight, nightmares come for him.

Benign, by most standards: shadows of destruction echoing of an unmaker, loping with jerking movements and crushing split bark underneath their claws, but Ronan creates at the same pace as they advance. It's a lost battle when every step is met with a ditch, every inch forward tugged back by a leash, any progress barred by a wall to be cut down with grievous effort. He's gotten good at fighting them. Knows what to say, what to do, how to feel when they tell him that his emotions are worth nothing and knows what lies look like when they slip through teeth. It's all the same ones he's ever told himself, and they've no place for consideration anymore.

The nightmare changes when they are finally upon him — when he relaxes his defenses and lets them near. Before they are allowed to strike, they burst apart into dragonflies of all colors, translucent beating wings, and disperse as flecks of dust on wind. Ronan watches them go, a flock of both small and large creatures, radiating in every direction. It's not a nightmare anymore. When it's time to leave, it's only a dream.

Adam is next to him. Not in the dream, but outside of it, in real life, Adam is here. He is right next to him, sleeping and unprotected. Without any doubt in Ronan's mind, he knows he will not take anything back to hurt Adam, because he would let the monsters have him first. Such a thing would be unforgivable.

The illusion is slipping away. The sheets gain more texture under Ronan's cheek, and the tickle on his nose becomes more pronounced. Waking up is a hesitant, black process, and with unconsciousness receding, he cracks open his eyelids, and takes the last step to wakefulness himself.

Adam rests on his back, one arm on his stomach, the other tucked underneath his pillow. It's just a bird's cry away from dawn, blue-gray light coming through the window. Ronan feels a comfort under his skin that his dreams couldn't chase away. He stretches loosely against Adam's side, face tucked into the sleeve of Adam's soft shirt, and breathes in the faint, familiar scent of him. Adam is still soundly sleeping, his parted lips and relaxed brow proof of something Ronan had been unable to name months ago but now he can put a word to.

Waking up next to the boy he loves is still something he is getting used to.

That word — it makes his eyes cut to the side, fingers twitch and lungs double-take.

There it is again. A word for the subconscious, the accidental, though somehow, now it is for him when he is awake. But it is still confined to unspoken silence, a resident of early mornings and late nights. He has yet to give it a voice.

When he first thought it, at the end of a dizzying, sky-pulling dream, Ronan couldn't stop thinking about it. The dream had involved Adam, his apartment above St. Agnes, and Ronan not sleeping on the damn floor for once. Not curling into the floorboards an exile and a white liar, not facing away from the prepossessing peace gifted away by Adam's resting form, not regulating his breathing until Adam's own evened out, a rhythm Ronan thinks he could have put music to. There is no color in the dark ordinarily, but in that dream, his senses were full of blue and the sepia of Adam's skin underneath his fingertips.

In that dream, words hung from the air like wind chimes and Adam was the billowing breeze making them sing.

Most others were simple: Adam sitting behind him in class, both of them in the main room of Monmouth Manufacturing on a humid and hazy summer afternoon, Adam in the passenger seat of the BMW while Ronan pushed a pace that didn't exist on speedometers. Some versions of Adam in these dreamscapes looked at him with disdain. The real Adam would do that sometimes, but not with the knowing — deeply knowing — judgment of his dreams. Those Adams saw his core, the depth of his desire, and rejected him.

But some were so very kind to him.

He had curled into Adam's small mattress under cramped and sloped ceilings, though in reality, on normal nights, he would sequester himself to the hard surface next to the bed, lying about his comfort at every chance. When he did sleep over — having paced twenty turns over and over again before deciding to give in, infinitesimally, to the thrill of seeing Adam again — he kept a reassuring distance, not letting on that all he thought about was crawling into that same bed and sleeping under the sparse covers. Just sleeping. Just being close enough to count his freckles, feel his warmth, listen to his slowing exhales as he drifted off. Sometimes thinking about it too much, picturing it, made him shift on the floor, the longing growing stronger with every shade darker the night grew.

Sometimes, his sleeping mind bestowed him an utmost kindness, even if he woke up with often more shame than the deprecating dreams gave him. Stealing moments for himself, intimate ones, even if unreal, is not a Greywaren thing to do. But he could not help it.

He could not help the surging wonder simmering below the surface of his expression when he looked at Adam. They faced each other, inches apart, on the same pillow. Adam only had two pillows: flat, paper things in dark sheets. Mismatched styles of bedding wrapped around their waists and bare chests.

They weren't even touching, and it wasn't their bodies that twisted Ronan's heart and marked the dream as a joyous one. It was Adam's smile, a lighthouse to Ronan's wayfaring. It was the crinkle in the corner of his eyes and his lips on the brink of laughter. It was the way he looked at him, captivating Ronan's spirit and steadying it in place. Everything was acceptance.

Adam said something, but Ronan couldn't figure out what it was. _Tell him, tell him_ , the air echoed, a reflection pool of his thoughts. He wasn't sure if he could without everything being lost. He wasn't sure if he could say the words. _Show him_. A great precipice of anticipation languished before him like a twenty foot wave whenever he thought about all the ways he could show Adam Parrish how he felt.

He wanted to — he was afraid. God, he wanted to. The dream felt safe. So he leaned into that smile, closing his eyes, and brushed their lips together.

Sometimes, he was a thief.

Falling asleep next to the boy he loves is something he is still getting used to. Back then, it was only a dream.

He woke from it with a soreness in his chest, with an empty space something had tried invading and occupying but in the morning had gone, had pried open his ribs and hadn't paid rent. It scurried off into the night, into his subconscious. There was no use in denying it — not any longer, so he tried out that singular word in a singular sentence:

 _I love him_.

He rolled over in his bed at Monmouth, face pressed to pillow, simultaneously trying to roll away the calamity of what came over him with just a few words in his mind. He pictured chucking that phrase at the wall, the letters shattering and sticking into the cracks in the floor like shards of glass. But they were just thoughts, and they could not be excommunicated so metaphorically. He was himself, and he did not hate it, but his heart felt like a heretic, and it was fucking impossible. Getting back to sleep was impossible; staying awake was impossible;

the thing of being Ronan Lynch is impossible.

Waking up next to no one at all is something he had always been used to.

Loving the difference is new.

It isn't often that word is allowed to run rampant. Months ago, it was a dangerous truth that wasn't ready to be properly harnessed. It threatened to run amok as it pleased and kill his whole fucking vibe. But as the weeks passed, as hours in classes passed watching Adam tap a pencil to his nose, spin it deftly between his long fingers, as he watched his eyes crease as a side-effect of easy evening laughter across a dimly-lit pizzeria table, when Adam caught him looking — it became a tick, a quirk, a _fuck, fuck I'm in love with him_ , an abrasive self-scolding when he averted his eyes. It shouted at him, a begging requiem and at first, Ronan would have done anything for a goddamn break from it.

Presently, Adam is still asleep. His chest rises and falls in deeply rhythmic breaths, usual lines of his exhaustion faded and relaxed. Ronan feels a powerful urge to brush the backs of his fingers along Adam's cheekbones, but he doesn't want to wake him. There isn't a question of whether Ronan would ever want to part with this. He knows he never will.

Holding that honesty away from Adam grows more despicable every day, but keeping secrets unspoken is a Lynch hobby, a glorified pastime. He keeps secrets like Adam keeps time — obsessively, and at all moments of the day. However, where Adam never faults in his keeping, Ronan approaches his own like he does with all else: with reckless abandon.

It seeps through his every mannerism. With every glance and shoulder bump and casual kneeing, he has grown used to being seen. When Ronan looks away, Adam's eyes linger. When he falls in step with Adam to stay by his side, Ronan notices his hidden smile. He is good at noticing things about Adam Parrish, and he wonders how easy it was to notice things about himself.

Secret-keeping runs through the generations of Lynch men — but his father always spoke of breaking the mold.

He still hasn't said that damn word aloud. _I should tell him_ , Ronan now thinks, as freely as he had once thought _I want to kiss him_ accompanied by a dreamy melody in his childhood bedroom and believing, hoping, praying that Adam wanted that, too. He doesn't know if love means the same thing to Adam as it does to him. All Ronan knows is that there isn't an ocean he wouldn't cross, a skyline he wouldn't topple, a foe he wouldn't fell to have Adam be happy. He knows how he feels, and he just wishes putting words to it could be as easy as it is in dreams.

A sharp intake of breath distracts Ronan from his thoughts. Adam is shifting, not quite awake, but getting there with the beginnings of dawn light warming his cheeks. It breaks through the thin leaves of the birch trees outside. The bedroom blinds are rarely closed — Ronan couldn't go without seeing the sky unless he was dreaming of it. Adam's arm curls further into his chest, tucked into his own space, and Ronan's romance-stricken mind supplies several praises of embarrassing adoration that would flush his face if spoken of. His loose shirt, borrowed from Ronan, bunches around his bicep and pulls with the movement, shoulder blade winged and shadowed.

Adam looks otherworldly when he sleeps, and in the in-between of dreams and waking, he moves like a skittering animal, odd stretches and inhalations. Ronan knows, in these moments, that people are a strange species of put-together genes, and he finds himself altogether gloried by the unwound versions of themselves.

When Ronan returns to looking at his face, Adam is blinking slowly up at him.

"Hey," he says, low and unused from a night's sleep. He wears a smile so open and content, so reminiscent of dreams, Ronan forgets all else and almost says it right then.

He wants to. Instead, he returns, "Hey," and lightly brushes his thumb across Adam's cheekbone for the barest second. Adam takes his hand before he retreats, and kisses his palm. God, he wants to say it, _just say it, he's beautiful and unbelievable, he might say it back, Jesus Christ_ —

"I had a nice dream," whispers Adam. He is tracing the lines of Ronan's hand, the inner creases of his knuckles. A nice dream; Ronan's own could be described differently, but he is much more interested in hearing about Adam's. He hums questioningly, and lets his hand be turned about by gentle fingers, occasionally pressed against Adam's mouth.

"Ronan," Adam says, and his name asks for something. Ronan searches his eyes, and they are soft, earnest. Adam bites his lip and lets it go just as soon, gaze flicking focus across Ronan's face. _Just say it_ —

"I love you."

It's an echo of dreams long passed, pulled from subconsciousness into the waking world. It is a long time coming, a sentence long thought, a sentiment felt in bones and bedsheets.

But it wasn't Ronan that had said it.

Adam is blushing and bright and smiling following his words, words that singe through Ronan like fire in a storm, like lightning on wet grass. A waterfall in his ears drowns out a pounding heart in his chest. Ronan stares at crinkled eyes, and Adam brings a hand up to his cheek, where it rests in the warm morning light.

This, he can get used to. Them. _Us_ , he tries out. He imagines days starting and ending with that word.

He says it back.

Of course he does. He's been saying it this whole time.


End file.
